Sometimes stress seems out of your control; there’s always bills to pay, family to look after, work to go to and never enough hours to do it all – but you have more power over stress than your think. In fact, the first step to mental health and wellness is realising that you are in control of your own life. Managing stress is all about taking charge of your wellbeing, so how do you do it?
1. Identify stress sources: The true sources of your stress aren’t always obvious, especially because you can easily overlook your own stress-inducing thought patterns, feelings and behaviours. For example, work deadlines are a common stressor, but maybe the real stress lies in your procrastination at work.
2. Look at your current coping mechanisms: How do you currently manage and cope with stress in your life? Starting a stress journal – in which you note the cause of your stress, your physical and emotional response, how you acted in response and what you did to make yourself feel better – can help you identify your coping mechanisms. Unhealthy coping strategies include smoking, drinking, over- or under-eating, withdrawing from others, zoning out for hours in front of the TV or computer, drugs, oversleeping, procrastinating, taking things out on others and filling up every minute of the day to avoid facing problems.
3. Avoid unnecessary stress: While it’s not always healthy or even possible to avoid stressful situations, you can eliminate a number of stressors in your life.
- When you’re reaching your limit of what you can handle, learn how to say know when someone tries to pile on more to do.
- If you have a person in your life who consistently causes you stress you can’t turn the relationship around, limit the amount of time you spend with that person or end the relationship entirely.
- If environmental factors cause you stress, change your environment. This means turning off the evening news if it makes you anxious, travelling a different way home if traffic makes you tense, or doing your food shopping online if going to the supermarket is such a chore.
- If hot-button topics – like religion or politics – make you upset, stop bringing them up in conversation. If someone else starts talking about things you don’t want to talk about, change the subject or excuse yourself.
4. Alter the situation: If you can’t avoid it; change it! Adapting the way you communicate and interact with others can change things so the problem doesn’t present itself in the future. If a situation or person bothers you, don’t bottle up those feelings but share them in an open and respectful way. Resentment only compounds the problem, but make sure you’re willing to compromise and change your behaviour too. If you both bend a little bit, you can find a happy middle ground. While you can’t alter stressful situations while they’re happening, managing your time better the next time around can help prevent the amount of stress you find yourself under.
5. Adapt to the stressor: If you can’t change or avoid the stressor, you can always change your own expectations and attitude. Try to look at these stressful situations from a more positive perspective. Instead of getting irate over a traffic jam, seize it as an opportunity to think or listen to some music and sing in the car. Ask yourself if these problems will be all that important tomorrow, in a year or in 10 years from now. Looking at the big picture will help you to focus your time and energy on things that matter.